We were lucky to catch up with Robert Rivers recently and have shared our conversation below.

Robert, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The Promised Land. An ongoing project. Triggered by the death of my nephew Thomas KIA Afghanistan April 28, 2010.
I started a set of 22×30” drawings that day. Matter of fact the original one is in the permanent collection of the Orlando Museum of Art. After working on this set of drawings ( The Promised Land) one night late in 2018- I joined 3 of the sheets together forming a panel that is 5.5’ x 2.5’. There now over 530 panels. In 2021 the Orlando Museum of Art displayed 67 of the panels and I was rewarded the Florida Prize.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

From my earliest childhood, regardless of all else, I have incessantly, painstakingly, and furiously, drawn pictures. I was born and raised in Alabama – not the typical place one would expect to produce many renowned visual artists: most Alabama’s residents are religious, politically conservative, and forever defined by their degree of fealty to the football teams of either the University of Alabama or Auburn University. My father did not think art manly. So, I played football for nine years and drawing was what I did on my own.
It was not until 1971 after a stint as an animal trainer, that I enrolled into my first art course at Auburn. Although I received my degree in visual design, etching captured my heart. I labored for two years as an art coordinator before I was accepted into the University of Georgia MFA program as a lowly unclassified postgraduate in 1975. At the University of Georgia, I concentrated on a series of etchings the faculty and fellow students named the Hospital Prints. This cycle of prints was based on the deeply felt, personal loss of my mother. The next year, 1976, I was awarded The Ford Foundation Grant.
In 1978 the University of Wisconsin-Superior hired me as an Assistant Professor. I thrived as a teacher and found it to be kin to coaching. The print room was very conducive to etching and in the two years I was there, I completed over 250 plates.
In 1980 I was hired by the University of Central Florida where I met Senior Lecturer George Donald, an exchange Professor from Edinburgh Art College. George took a set of my most recent etchings and upon his return to Scotland showed them to the print community. There was an unexpected cancelation of the planned show at the Edinburgh Art College for the Edinburg International Festival and my work was substituted. My first solo exhibition was praised by The Scotsman as being the most “original and astonishing” art in the 1981 International Festival. Not only did I receive an invitation to be an exchange professor at Edinburgh College of Art (at that time Europe’s largest Art College), but I was also invited to work at Scotland’s premier printshops, editioning selected plates from my series of prints The War Prayer. This series of prints was inspired by Mark Twain’s essay by the same title. I employed basic etching techniques in working the 24” x 36” deeply bit copper plates. The resulting embossment sometimes reaches ¼” above the paper. The distress I put the plates through is reflected in the imagery, which presages that of The Promised Land. Some of these prints are included in my Handmade Books, which gained recognition in the UK and the US.
In 1995 I traveled to Patagonia. Speaking no Spanish, I climbed mountains, paddled white water, and drew. When I returned, Larry Cooper, a colleague at UCF, bound my drawings into books. These books are now in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (Smithsonian), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and other private collections. My connection with Scotland is ongoing. I was invited to participate in the Royal Scottish Academy’s 2017 Ages of Wonder exhibition. I taught a master drawing workshop in the RSA gallery while open to the public.
The main body of my work, from The Hospital Prints (1976) to The Promised Land (2010-present) is informed by tragic death: the former that of my mother in 1974; the latter that of my beloved nephew Thomas, a Marine killed in Afghanistan in 2010.While The Hospital Prints are a direct reference to a singular traumatic event, The Promised Land paintings, a series of over 450 mixed-media paintings on 22” x 30” paper, addresses violence, war, and death in a deliberately enigmatic and metaphorical manner. Repeating iconic images drawn from my experience (some of which have persisted from childhood), from the mythology of
many cultures, and from historical depictions, these paintings are both a tribute to Thomas and a rumination upon Death in general, by violence in particular; the fragility and persistence of life; the uncertainty of an afterlife, the innocence of youth, and the intensity with which our lives are bound to one another, regardless of circumstance.
Where The Promised Land paintings are 22” x 30” in size, The Promised Land project is constructed on panels measuring 5.5’ x 2.5’. I started The Promised Land project in December 2018 and as of August 2023 there are 458 panels measuring over 1000’ in length. These panels build on the themes of the smaller Promised Land paintings. Sixty-nine panels were selected for the 2021 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art, and as a result I was awarded the $20,000 prize. Consequently, sixty-five of the panels were selected to be exhibited at the 2022-2023 Florida Contemporary exhibition at the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida. I have no plan to finish this work: it may be my Watts Tower…

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The week I deinstalled the 69 panels from the Orlando Museum of Art, I had a serious accident while riding my horse. My drawing hand was stepped on and de gloved and my right collarbone was broken and required surgery. I continued to draw with my left hand. These panels were included in the show I had at the Baker Museum in Naples Florida .

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It was important book for me to struggle thru. Improved my discipline. Joyce Cary’s The Horses Mouth also was a major bookmark in my life.Rainbow. It was important book for me to struggle thru. Improved my discipline. Joyce Cary’s The Horses Mouth also was a major bookmark in my life.
Movies have played another important role in my work. The films of Kurosawa were especially important. These films jump back and between reality and fantasy giving them the magic of dream shifts that I embrace.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.robertrivers.com

Image Credits

Jim Hobart